Your Right to Mental Privacy in the Age of Brain-Sensing Tech | Nita Farahany | TED

Today, we know and track virtually nothing that’s happening in our own brains.

But in a future that is coming much faster than you realize,

all of that is about to change.

We're now familiar with sensors in our smart watches to our rings,

that track everything from our heartbeats to our footsteps, breaths,

body temperature, even our sleep.

Now, consumer neurotech devices are being sold worldwide

to enable us to track our own brain activity.

As companies from Meta to Microsoft,

Snap and even Apple

begin to embed brain sensors in our everyday devices

like our earbuds, headphones, headbands, watches and even wearable tattoos,

we're reaching an inflection point in brain transparency.

And those are just some of the company names we're familiar with.

There are so many more.

Consumer neurotech devices are moving from niche products

with limited applications

to becoming the way in which we'll learn about our own brain activity,

our controller for virtual reality and augmented reality.

And one of the primary ways we'll interact

with all of the rest of our technology.

Even conservative estimates of the neurotech industry

put it at more than 38 billion dollars by 2032.

This new category of technology presents unprecedented possibility,

both good and bad.

Consider how our physical health and well-being are increasing

while neurological disease and suffering continue to rise.

55 million people around the world are struggling with dementia,

with more than 60 to 70 percent of them suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Nearly a billion people struggle with mental health

and drug use disorders.

Depression affects more than 300 million.

Consumer neurotech devices could finally enable us

to treat our brain health and wellness

as seriously as we treat the rest of our physical well-being.

But making our brains transparent to others

also introduces extraordinary risks.

Which is why, before it's too late to do so,

we must change the basic terms of service for neurotechnology

in favour of individual rights.

I say this not just as a law professor who believes in the power of law,

nor just a philosopher trying to flesh out norms,

but as a mother who's been personally and profoundly impacted

by the use of neurotechnology in my own life.

On Mother's Day in 2017,

as my daughter Calista lay cradled in my arms,

she took one last beautiful breath.

After a prolonged hospitalization,

complications following infections claimed her life.

The harrowing trauma that she endured and we witnessed stretched into weeks.

And I was left with lasting trauma

that progressed into post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sleep escaped me for years.

As each time I closed my eyes, I relived everything,

from the first moments that I was pushed out of the emergency room

to her gut-wrenching cries.

Ultimately, it was the help of a talented psychologist,

using exposure therapy,

and my use of neurofeedback

that enabled me to sleep through the night.

For others who are suffering from traumatic memories,

an innovative new approach using decoded neurofeedback,

or DecNef, may offer reprieve.

This groundbreaking approach uses machine-learning algorithms

to identify specific brain-activity patterns,

including those associated with traumatic memories.

Participants then play a game

that enables them to retrain their brain activity

on positive associations instead.

If I had had DecNef available to me at the time,

I might have overcome my PTSD more quickly

without having to relive every sound, terror and smell in order to do so.

I'm not the only one.

Sarah described herself as being at the end of her life,

no longer in a life worth living,

because of her severe and intractable depression.

Then, using implanted brain sensors

that reset her brain activity like a pacemaker for the brain,

Sarah reclaimed her will to live.

While implanted neurotechnology advances have been extraordinary,

it's the everyday brain sensors

that are embedded in our ordinary technology

that I believe will impact the majority of our lives.

Like the one third of adults

and nearly one quarter of children who are living with epilepsy

for whom conventional anti-seizure medications fail.

Now, researchers from Israel to Spain have developed brain sensors

using the power of AI in pattern recognition

and consumer electroencephalography

to enable the detection of epileptic seizures minutes

to up to an hour before they occur,

sending potentially life-saving alerts to a mobile device.

Regular use of brain sensors could even enable us

to detect the earliest stages

of the most aggressive forms of brain tumors, like glioblastoma,

where early detection is crucial to saving lives.

The same could hold true for Parkinson's disease, to Alzheimer's,

traumatic brain injury, ADHD, and even depression.

We may even change our brains for the better.

The brain training game industry,

worth a staggering 6.5 billion dollars in 2021,

was for years met with controversy

because of unsupported scientific claims about their efficacy.

But now some brain-training platforms like Cognizant have proven powerful

in improving brain processing speeds, memory, reasoning

and even executive functioning when played repeatedly over time.

When paired with neurofeedback devices for learning reinforcement,

this could revolutionize how we learn and adapt to change.

Other breakthroughs could be transformational

for the human experience.

Today, most human brain studies

are based on a very small number of participants

engaged in very specific tasks in a controlled laboratory environment.

With widespread use of brain sensors,

the data we could have to learn about the human brain

would exponentially increase.

With sufficiently large datasets of long-term, real-world data

from people engaged in everyday activity,

we just might address everything from neurological disease and suffering

to creating transformational possibilities for the human experience.

But all of this will only be possible

if people can confidently share their brain data

without fear that it will be misused against them.

You see, the brain data that will be collected

and generated by these devices

won't be collected in traditional laboratory environments

or in clinical research studies run by physicians and scientists.

Instead, it will be the sellers of these new devices,

the very companies who've been commodifying our personal data for years.

Which is why we can't go into this new era naive about the risks

or complacent about the challenges

that the collection and sharing our brain data will pose.

Scientific hurdles can and will be addressed in time,

but the social hurdles will be the most challenging.

Unlike the technologies of the past that track and hack the human brain,

brain sensors provide direct access to the part of ourselves

that we hold back,

that we don't express through our words and our actions.

Brain data in many instances will be more sensitive

than the personal data of the past,

because it reflects our feelings, our mental states, our emotions,

our preferences, our desires, even our very thoughts.

I would never have wanted the data that was collected

as I worked through the trauma of my personal loss

to have been commodified,

shared and analyzed by others.

These aren't just hypothetical risks.

Take Entertek, a Hangzhou-based company,

who has collected millions of instances of brain activity data

as people have engaged in mind-controlled car racing,

sleeping, working,

even using neurofeedback with their devices.

They've already entered into partnerships with other companies

to share and analyze that data.

Unless people have individual control over their brain data,

it will be used for microtargeting or worse,

instead of treating dementia.

Like the employees worldwide

who've already been subject to brain surveillance in the workplace

to track their attention and fatigue,

to governments, developing brain biometrics,

to authenticate people at borders,

to interrogate criminal suspects' brains

and even weapons that are being crafted

to disable and disorient the human brain.

Brain wearables will have not only read but write capabilities,

creating risks that our brains can be hacked, manipulated,

and even subject to targeted attacks.

We must act quickly to safeguard against the very real

and terrifying risks to our innermost selves.

Recognizing a human right to cognitive liberty

would offer those safeguards.

Cognitive liberty is a right from interference by others,

but it is also a right to self-determination

over our brains and mental experiences to enable human flourishing.

To achieve this,

we need to recognize three interrelated human rights

and update our understanding of them

to secure to us a right to mental privacy,

to safeguard us from interference with our automatic reactions,

our emotions and our thoughts.

Freedom of thought as an absolute human right

to protect us from interception,

manipulation and punishment of our thoughts.

And self-determination

to secure self-ownership over our brains and mental experiences,

to access and change them if we want to do so.

There are important efforts already underway

from the UN to UNESCO, in nations worldwide,

over rights and regulations around neurotechnologies.

But those rights need to be better aligned

with a broader set of digital rights.

Cognitive liberty is an update to liberty in the digital age

as an umbrella concept of human flourishing

across digital technologies.

Because the right way forward isn't through metaverse rights

or AI rights

or neurotech rights and the like.

It's to recognize that these technologies don't exist in silos,

but in combination, affecting our brains and mental experiences.

We are literally at a moment before.

And I mean a moment.

Consumer brain wearables have already arrived,

and the commodification of our brains has already begun.

It's now just a question of scale.

We haven't yet passed the inflection point

where most of our brains can be directly accessed and changed by others.

But it is about to happen,

giving us a final moment to make a change

so that we don't look back in a few years' time

and lament the world we've left behind.

We can and should be hopeful and deliberate

about the choices we make now

to secure a right to self-determination over our brains and mental experiences.

The possibilities, if we do so,

are limited only by our imagination.

Thank you.

(Applause)